Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
5:10 AM, Wednesday August 28th 2024
Thankyou for the critique
Starting with your form intersections, overall I'm pleased with the confidence and the overall approach you're using with your intersections - there are a number of small errors, many of which I've noted here, but this is honestly something of a peculiar case where all of the signs I'm seeing suggest that you are working with a sense of spatial reasoning that is in fact well developed, but you're making a number of strange decisions in how you engage with some of your intersections that result in mistakes.
In the notes I drew on the page, I included a number of hand-written explanations for each specific instance - not to give you things to memorize (this is very much not the sort of thing we can get through by memorizing the different combinations of things), but more to link back to the feedback I provided to you in Lesson 6 and further demonstrate how to think through those individual cases to better develop your overall understanding of how these different forms and surfaces relate to one another in 3D space. I recommend going through these new notes while also going through that Lesson 6 feedback.
One point I did notice is that there were some cases where it seemed that you may have been drawing the intersections on the opposite side of the form (meaning that if we weren't drawing through the forms, we wouldn't be able to see them). You didn't do this often, but it is something I would definitely avoid, just because attempting to draw the intersections on the opposite side can be more distracting than it's worth, and ultimately get in the way.
Ultimately and above all else, it's important to remember that an intersection occurs between surfaces - it's not about memorizing the ways in which different whole forms can intersect, and more than that, attempting to memorize things can actually make us more likely to make mistakes. Instead of focusing on the forms in front of us (which, being drawn on a flat surface makes them that much more difficult to understand in 3D space), it causes us to focus more on the idea of those forms, and how they would generally interact. We want to be looking at the actual surfaces, and considering them in pairs - so for example in this diagram I'd shared with you before, it's not a box intersecting with a sphere - it's one plane of the box slicing the sphere in one direction, and then another plane of the box slicing the sphere in a different direction, and those two distinct parts being stitched together at the edge between the boxes' planes with a sharp corner. And when that edge is transformed into a more gradual, rounded transition, so too does the transition from one segment of the intersection to the other become more complex - but it all comes down to the surfaces at play.
Anyway, to bring things back around, while there are mistakes here, the underlying things I'm seeing suggest that your understanding of those relationships is still coming along well, but that there may be some presuppositions you're making that are getting in your way.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is by and large coming along well, but one thing I would recommend is that you extend your lines further so as to make the line extension analysis more valuable to you. That can mean allowing the line extensions to overlap each other and the other boxes (as you can see in this example from the box challenge, or drawing fewer boxes on the page so as to allow room for those extensions. The former is what I'd do, although I understand that some students may find the overlapping to make things difficult to parse.
Moving onto the form intersection vehicles, overall you've used this exercise well for the purpose it was intended - which is to keep students' focus on the idea of building up whole volumes and solid structures, where some of the later more detailed demos can shift us to thinking more in terms of creating a lot of individual edges, and then stitching them together at the end (so in a manner of speaking, students may end up thinking more in terms of building something out of toothpicks, rather than whittling it out of a block of wood). That said, there are a couple things that I wanted to call out that, though they did not interfere with the purpose of the exercise, they may be points for you to keep in mind going forward, in terms of how you decide how much time to spend on a given task, and which tools you're willing to use:
There are a number of signs that suggest that you may not have given yourself as much time with each mark as you could have, resulting in work that was a little sloppier here than necessary. For example, if we look at your tank, the linework is visibly drawn slowly and hesitantly - completely going against the principles behind the ghosting method from Lesson 1, which is meant to be used for every mark we freehand throughout this course. Now, I can't speak specifically to whether or not you were attempting to use the ghosting method (I can see a few little stray dots and things that suggest that at least in some cases, you may have been), but the results suggest that if this was the case, that you may have forgotten the core of the method, which is all to separate the markmaking process into distinct steps, each with their own priorities. First we identify the nature of the mark we wish to make (in the case of a straight line, marking the start/end points). Second in the preparation phase we ghost through the motion to familiarize ourselves with it. And third, in the execution phase we commit to the mark as confidently as we can, not allowing ourselves to hesitate or worry about whether the mark will be accurate, as the opportunities for addressing that have passed. It's all about committing to what we'd practiced in the preparation phase and executing with confidence. It might be a good idea to review the material on the ghosting method here.
Technically this exercise did not require us to freehand. Ellipses, given that most students are working with the more limited master ellipse template, I can certainly understand freehanding, since the master ellipse template's main benefit in this lesson is with the "constructing to scale" approach for creating our bounding boxes' unit grids, but a ruler can still be very useful in terms of keeping us focused on the specific concepts this lesson addresses. I'm glad to see that you used one in your later constructions, and did so to great effect, but here it seems that you didn't quite choose between the two options (one being to use a ruler, the other being to take as much time as is required for you to apply the ghosting method thoroughly to each and every freehanded mark). It looks more like you opted to freehand, but tried to do so in less time than it demanded.
Finally, looking at your more detailed vehicle constructions, these are by and large very well done. You've done an excellent job of breaking down your orthographic plans so as to arm yourself with clearly made decisions that can be transferred to your 3D construction (instead of having to make those decisions on the fly as you build in 3D), and while some constructions - like this coupe - may have leveraged this to a decent extent, but not as completely as it could have, I can see clearly in later constructions like this formula 1 race car that you learned from this and opted to push even harder.
I'm very pleased to see that you really stuck with the idea of taking your time, and letting the problem you were facing dictate how much time it would take you. One of the biggest pitfalls we run into with this lesson is students not quite realizing just how demanding the capstone on their Drawabox coursework would be, and so some end up rushing it and in some cases receiving an anticlimactic "it's good enough to be marked as complete but you could have done better" (which can often be worse than some revisions), or even a full redo in especially rare ones. You however definitely showed that you were willing to commit to the task, and see it through.
So, all in all, I'm quite pleased with your work. There are certainly some hiccups in the form intersections that will be ironed out with further practice and further review of the feedback I provided here and back in Lesson 6, and there were some less than ideal choices made for your form intersection vehicles, but you definitely showed the best of your efforts with the detailed vehicle constructions and it certainly paid off. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations, you have certainly earned it!
Thankyou for the critique
Stan Prokopenko's had been teaching figure drawing as far back as I can remember, even when I was just a regular student myself. It's safe to say that when it comes to figure drawing, his tutelage is among the best.
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